Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the
part where it says "No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the
United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the
office of President," is disconnected from realpolitik. If it reflected today's
reality, it would read more along these lines:

No person who cannot overcome arcane
ballot access laws in fifty states and is not a billionaire shall be eligible to the
office of president except those nominated by the reigning duopoly and condoned by the New
York Times and Washington Post or the five polling companies that are contracted to
provide polls to the bipartisan, corporate-funded commission on presidential debates lest
they be thought to clutter the playing field or deprive one of the other candidates of
their rightful entitlement to all the votes that the aspiring person might otherwise take.

Running for president as a third-party
candidate permits an eyewitness view of the multifaceted barriers that prevent third
parties in this country from competing fairly in the democratic process. The hurdles are
so prevalent that leaders of oligarchic regimes in foreign countries might blush. From
media coverage to ballot access and participation in the presidential debates, the
obstacles to competing in the political process loom large and the political will to
reduce them is puny.

Media Coverage

Our campaign was launched in February 2000
to seek the presidential nomination of the Green Party because of the democracy gap in our
country. The announcement came at an opening address at the Madison Hotel in Washington,
D.C., replete with an extensive explanation about how civil society is having a harder
time getting things done because corporate influence and dollars have rendered a
bought-and-paid-for political scene in Washington that either is beholden to their
corporate paymasters or largely indifferent to corporate control of some of our basic
public institutions. The resulting loss attributable to this gap was discussed in detail.
The Washington Post, which is headquartered across 15th Street, could not be bothered to
send a reporter. There were some cameras and other reporters, but almost no coverage. The
announcement earned a three-hundred-word squib in the New York Times, akin to the amount
of space they devote to a couple of marriage notices.

The first lesson of entering the race for
president as a citizen seeking a third-party nomination rather than as a major party
candidate was that one can count on receiving almost no media coverage. If you don't speak
in eight-second sound bites, you're not likely to get coverage in the standard seventeen
minutes of corporate news cycles exclusively filled by leads that bleed, lengthy weather
reports, cute animal stories, and chitchat between the anchors. Even when the campaign
filled Madison Square Garden in mid-October, on ten days' notice, with more than fifteen
thousand paying people, the Washington Post still did not cover it. The Nader campaign was
unique in its ability to draw such large paying crowds to its political rallies. It is one
thing to fail to provide daily coverage of third-party candidates, even while routine
coverage of major party candidates extends to the trivial, but it is another matter to
fail to report the history-making aspects of a third-party campaign.

Throughout the campaign, all that the
press wanted to cover was the horse race. A candidate can talk about the death penalty;
child poverty; racial profiling; corporate crime, fraud, and abuse; the failed war on
drugs; the millions of people without health insurance; campaign finance failures; and all
the pressing problems of the day. The candidate can go to all fifty states, to housing
projects and homeless shelters, and put out sixty-plus position papers, and two to four
press releases a day. Yet at the end of the day, the only thing the press cares about is
the horse race and whether a third-party candidate is "stealing" votes from
either or both of the major party candidates. The use of the press's language itself is
indicative of the two-party mind-set: a candidate who competes in a primary is accorded
equal footing as a "challenger" with the "frontrunner," while a
third-party candidate who competes in the general election is considered a
"spoiler" for daring to enter the duopolists' playing field and s tealing votes.

If you do get coverage as a third-party
candidate, it is likely to be cast as some kind of style or feature story. Third-party
candidates are not news; they are treated just as oddities--or worse, clutter. The New
York Times, as early as June, pronounced in its lead editorial that the voters should have
a clear thumbs up or down choice on just Bush and Gore. The Nader-LaDuke campaign was
considered to be cluttering the field. Over the course of the campaign, it became apparent
that the New York Times would say just about anything to make sure that Al Gore won. This
was the case not only for the editorial board, since some reporters would editorialize as
well. There were some notable exceptions among the media, such as the Village Voice and
The Nation, but not many

Of course, most third parties cannot
afford much media advertising. Our campaign spent under $2 million on media advertising.
Pat Buchanan spent nearly everything from the Reform Party millions on ballot access or
advertisements. According to posted FEC records, the Bush campaign spent approximately $73
million on media. The Gore campaign spent approximately $51 million. This does not include
what the parties or advocacy groups spent on media on behalf of the major-party
candidates. A substantial percentage of the contributions made to campaigns or parties are
thus funneled into the television broadcasters' pockets to pay for ads that are mostly
displayed in the swing states, with virtually all other states being ignored.

The Alliance for Better Campaigns, a
public-interest group led by Paul Taylor, has a study on its Website
(www.bettercampaigns.org) about the broadcasters and their price gouging entitled
"Gouging Democracy" (See also www.Greedytv.org, and the article in this issue of
the National Civic Review by Matt Farrey of the alliance.) The television industry raked
in more than $770 million for political ads in the 2000 elections; of the stations
surveyed, most provided less than forty-five seconds a night of coverage--total--for the
candidates. No wonder the television networks barely cover the two major party
conventions. It appears to be better for their bottom line to freeze out the politicians
and make them pay top dollar for ads in order to get any time at all on the publicly owned
airwaves.

Of course, since the system serves the
duopolists well, neither party in Congress has much incentive to change it. Candidates
seem to prefer having controlled messages compacted into thirty-second ads. (Some
candidates refused to have a press conference for weeks on end!) If we want fair
elections, though, then the landlords of the airwaves--the taxpayers who own this piece of
the commonwealth--should be able to require that the tenants (the broadcasters who rent
these public assets) provide free airtime to candidates who are on the ballot for public
office.

Ballot Access

Apart from the problems in getting
coverage, how do candidates for president actually get in the position where the voters
can vote for them? In the United States, each state has not only its own specially
designed (butterfly) ballot but also its own arcane set of grossly complicated procedures
for getting on the ballot. Mind you, bipartisan-controlled state assemblies created all
these incredible obstacles.

Richard Winger, who publishes Ballot
Access News (www.ballot-access.org), does a formidable job of chronicling these outrages.
Among the crippling provisions encountered during election 2000, consider these:

To qualify for the ballot in Texas, a
political party needed to collect 37,713 signatures in a seventy-five-day period; those
who signed the petition could not have voted in the state's primary.

In North Carolina, a party needed 51,324
signatures by May 15 of the election year. By statute, the petition has a must-carry
phrase that reads "The signers of this petition intend to organize a new political
party. . . ." To contemplate the chilling effect, simply ask yourself: When was the
last time you signed something that would require you to commit to organizing a new
political party?

In Virginia, a candidate needs 10,000
signatures, four hundred from each congressional district. Circulators there can only
petition in the county they live in and an adjacent county.

In Illinois, a new party needs 25,000
signatures to get on the ballot, while "established parties" only need 5,000
signatures.

In Oklahoma, 36,202 signatures are required
for a candidate to qualify for the ballot. With a population of 3,350,000, Oklahoma ranks
28th in the nation in population, but its total signature requirement is the fourth
highest in the United States and the highest per capita in the country.

Oklahoma (along with South Dakota) doesn't
allow write-in votes, which strikes us as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Those are just the raw number barriers.
But there are also excessive filing fees, early deadlines, and administrative hurdles. For
example, in Pennsylvania, the state requires signature forms on special colored paper; it
only provided four hundred forms though our volunteers needed more than two thousand. The
state would not accept forms downloaded from the Internet. In West Virginia and Georgia,
the filing fee is $4,000! In Michigan, petition forms had to be on odd-sized paper (8-1/2
by 13 inches).

In many states, our petitioners were
harassed and threatened with arrest by officials with a shallow understanding of the First
Amendment for circulating petitions in public places or taxpayer-financed parks and
recreation areas. In Mississippi, the mayor of Tupelo stopped our petitioners from working
in the town square at a festival on the Fourth of July. In Ohio, our petitioners were
stopped from collecting signatures at a public market in West Cleveland. The reports from
our volunteer petitioners were profiles in courage.

Of course, the Green Party is not the only
one to face this challenge. The Libertarian Party the Reform Party, the Natural Law Party,
and the Constitutional Party . . . all of the third parties have to go through this
charade every time they seek to compete with the established duopolists. What happens when
progress is made? The Democrats and Republicans who control the state assemblies and
legislatures just run back into session to make the hurdles tougher.

For these reasons, we need to encourage
adoption of a model ballot law and remove barriers to entry The Appleseed Center for
Electoral Reform and the Harvard Legislative Research Bureau set forth a Model Act for the
Democratization of Ballot Access [1] that includes these reforms:

Lower signature thresholds to a reasonable
level

Eliminate outrageous filing fees

End constraints on the identity of
petitioners and signers

Establish a filing deadline of, and allow
corrections until, September 1 of election year

Use random sampling for verification

Eliminate so-called sore-loser bans

Accept all write-in candidates

Apply all reforms to independent candidates

Allow performance in the last two elections
as qualification

Optimally, use a threshold of 0.05 percent
party registration to determine ballot access. We also suggest these additional voting
reforms to engage more voters in the process:

Adopt same-day voter registration. Just
when most people get excited about politics, in the last few weeks before the election, it
is too late to register to vote in most states. State and local officials should act to
follow the lead of those six states that allow eligible voters to register right up to the
election.

Open up the two-party system by adopting
proportional representation. Around the world, multiparty systems of proportional
representation allow citizens more-direct representation in their government.
Municipalities across the nation--including New York City--used proportional
representation systems for years before the major parties crushed the system. There are
countless opportunities at the state and local levels to reestablish this markedly more
democratic system.

Gauge public opinion at the polls by
initiating a national nonbinding advisory referendum. We should put forth nonbinding
referenda on salient local, state, and national issues for voting on Election Day. This
would allow the public an additional mechanism to directly instruct their
representatives--instead of forcing elected officials to rely on questionable commercial
polls.

Make every vote count by allowing instant
runoff voting. At every government level, we should follow the lead of London and the
countries of Ireland and Australia and establish a system of instant runoff voting. By
allowing voters to rank candidates (see the articles in this issue of the National Civic
Review by Castillo and McGrath, and Richie and Hill, for explanations of how this works),
we can liberate citizens to choose their favorite candidate, and ignore the cries of
"wasted vote" and "spoiler."

Adopt a binding, none-of-the-above option.
Voters should be able to reject unsatisfactory candidates by choosing none of the above
and, if NOTA wins, force a new election with new candidates.

Demand strict enforcement of the Voting
Rights Act. The debacle in Florida highlighted the extreme need for reassessing the impact
of race and class on electoral mechanics. The VRA must be enforced strictly to safeguard
the basic rights of citizens across the nation.

Accept a standardized national ballot.
There would have been no butterfly-ballot controversy if state and local officials had
cooperated in creating an effective standardized system for national elections.

Make election officials nonpartisan (not
bipartisan) at the local, state, and national levels. Officials usually respect the notion
that democracy trumps party loyalty, but inherent in a party system is the danger that a
few partisan officials will tilt the process in practice. State and local officials must
establish systems by which nonpartisan officials control the all-important mechanics of
election.

Count write-in ballots in all states.

Provide public disclosure of vote totals by
precinct on the Internet.

Provide access to voter registration forms
on the Internet.

Provide voter pamphlets online, at polling
places, and by mail to voters.

Provide nonpolitical assignment of ballot
lines.

Presidential Debates

If a third-party candidate braves the
Sisyphean daily task of getting a message out to the voters when almost no one in the
corporate-conglomerated fourth estate is willing to provide coverage, and if the candidate
spends tens of thousands of hours and dollars (in some cases millions) to overcome the
ballot access hurdles, there still remains the biggest barrier of all, the traditional
mechanism of reaching tens of millions of people in the age of television: participation
in presidential debates. The term presidential debate is almost a quaint misnomer
considering the love fest of agreement and the exercise in diversion displayed between the
major-party candidates during those encounters held last fall. The gatekeeper for the
viewing voters is a little-known entity called the Commission on Presidential Debates
(CPD).

The Commission on Presidential
Debates

In 1907, Congress enacted the Tillman Act,
prohibiting corporate contributions to any candidate running for federal office. In the
early 1970s, Congress enacted the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which, in part,
created an administrative agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to enforce the
act's campaign finance and disclosure laws, which include the 1907 prohibition on
corporate contributions to federal campaigns. Under these laws, for profit corporations
are not allowed to spend money "in connection with" campaigns for federal
office, unless the money is used for "nonpartisan activity."

Pursuant to the FECA, which should really
be renamed the Duopoly Protection Act, the FEC in the late 1970s told the League of Women
Voters (who used to sponsor the presidential debates) that they could not accept money
from corporations to help defray the cost of debates.

In 1987, the Democratic and Republican
Parties decided to take over the sponsorship of the debates by creating their own
commission. Notably, the CPD is run by the former chairmen of the Democratic and
Republican parties. After the CPD was established, the FEC (whose commission is composed
of three Democrats and three Republicans) rejected its own general counsel's opinion,
reversed its prior position, and adopted a regulation that allows corporations to spend
money to help stage federal candidate debates.

This loophole created in the regulatory
framework established by Congress allows corporate money to tilt the electoral playing
field for the two major party candidates. It is our position that the FEC regulation
exceeds the statutory authority granted by Congress and should be struck down. The
National Voting Rights Institute and pro bono lawyers are currently asking the U.S.
Supreme Court to consider the legality of this regulation.

If this legal challenge is successful,
corporate sponsors of the CPD debates--which include beer and tobacco companies--would
again be subject to the FECAS corporate contribution prohibition. We would then have
presidential debates that do not look like Bud bowls filled with corporate logos and an
Anheuser-Busch beer tent. In the age of the Invesco Stadium, the Fleet Center, the Target
Center, the United Center, and other exercises in corporate naming, can we still imagine
any sort of competition not replete with corporate advertisements even when the point is
to elect the president of the United States?

Adding insult to injury, eligibility for
getting a message out entails permission from a bipartisan commission, funded by beer and
tobacco money, that sets an arbitrary standard of reaching a 15 percent rating in five
polls of the commission's choosing--polls whose major media parent companies have
executives who give lots of money to the duopolists. With these criteria, Abraham Lincoln
would have been excluded from the debates; he wasn't even on the ballot in nine states.
The debate commission made a mistake, from their viewpoint, by letting Ross Perot into the
debates in 1992. The viewership shot up to more than ninety million Americans, and Perot
got 19 percent of the vote. But four years later, after the Clinton and Dole camps decided
to exclude Perot, network viewership plummeted to forty-two million.

Another independent candidate, Jesse
Ventura, got into the gubernatorial debates in Minnesota in 1998, and he became the
governor. It was clear during the 2000 presidential election that the Republicans and the
Democrats were not prepared to make this mistake again. We received a polite letter saying
we didn't meet their self-serving criteria for participation. Who knew that the
gatekeepers to the American presidency's electorate sit in a private office in Washington,
D.C.?

Indeed, the commission was so terrified of
competition they would not even let Ralph Nader physically near the debates. In October
2000, for the first debate at the University of Massachusetts, he had a ticket to get into
the auditorium adjacent to the scene of the debates, but the CPD decided to use state
troopers to keep him from listening to the debates and from talking to the media at the
media trailer--despite the fact that the media had invited him to do so. There are
countries abroad that we criticize for this kind of authoritarian behavior. We filed a
lawsuit in connection with this action; earlier this year, the federal judge in Boston
hearing the case denied the CPD's motion to dismiss.

No coverage, awful ballot laws, no access
to the voters through debates ... in the economic world, we would call each of these a
barrier to entry that distorts the market from perfect competition. Imagine if we told
entrepreneurs that before they were allowed to compete they had to have a 15 percent
market share. You can be sure that there would be antitrust suits.

Between the ballot access hurdles and the
debate commission, Nader 2000 brought eleven lawsuits in a nine-month campaign thanks to
the help of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, the National Voting Rights
Institute, and pro bono law firms. We had to arrange for the equivalent of a full-time
public-interest law firm just to level the playing ground to compete.

This does not even count the need to
defend. In a striking case of corporate immolation worthy of a case study at the Harvard
Business School, MasterCard decided to sue us for daring to parody their
"Priceless" ad campaign in noncommercial use of our campaign finance spoof on
the "things money can't buy"--a spot that was designed to move poll numbers and
get Nader into the debates. Apparently, MasterCard doesn't share our sense of humor, and
although they lost their attempt at a temporary restraining order, they are continuing to
sue us even after the election for alleged copyright and trademark infringement.

Campaigns, of course, are not priceless.
More than half a billion dollars was raised in soft money by the parties in the last
election cycle. The Washington Post in February 2001 editorialized that "the campaign
finance system is totally out of control.... In each of the last two presidential cycles,
the amount [of soft money] has doubled.... If officeholders aren't being bought by such
sums, the offices themselves surely are." [2]

The biggest obstacle to just government
action is the corruption of our election campaigns by special-interest money. No one
should have to sell out to big business or big donors to run a competitive campaign.
Political campaigns should be publicly financed, just like public libraries, parks, and
schools. We started the campaign with a $40,000 personal contribution by the candidate.
Our average donation was less than $100. We raised a little over $8 million in nine
months, taking no corporate money, no PAC money, and no soft money, and we did our frugal
best to run a nationwide campaign with the energy of volunteers and the Green Party To put
it into perspective, the Democratic Party spent $8 million advertising in the state of
Michigan alone.

To remove barriers to entry for third
parties, we need to end legalized bribery and support publicly financed campaigns. The
McCain-Feingold Bill that is pending as this article was being written is not the solution
to dirty-money politics. Although it eliminates soft money, the bill raises hard-money
limits, does not provide free airtime for candidates, and does not establish public
financing. Therefore, the barriers to entry for serious candidates will remain.

If a candidate overcomes all of these
structural barriers, there still remain a host of other problems, such as the bias in
favor of the two-party system that we are taught in school, straw polls that do not
include any of the other parties (Libertarian Party, Reform Party, Constitution Party,
Green Party), and the influence of parental voting patterns. Hereditary voting practices
have made voting for a third party an extraordinary political act. Third parties are
viewed as freak institutions because the United States doesn't have proportional
representation or instant runoff voting as other countries do, and because people are
generally unaware of how third parties have advanced justice in this country by raising
such radical ideas as abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the graduated income tax,
and deficit reduction.

In the mid-nineteenth century, it took
just six years for the Republicans to replace the Whigs as an emerging major party. Given
the structural hurdles in place favoring the Democratic and Republican parties, what would
it take for a startup to replace either of these entrenched parties today?

What is the price we pay for our forgone
democracy? What does it cost us in efforts not undertaken and social justice left
unrealized? Currently in the United States, there are thirty-eight million poor people, 20
percent of children live in deep poverty, 80 percent of workers have lost ground since
1973 (after adjusting wages for inflation), forty-six million people are without health
insurance, there is a record level of personal bankruptcy, and total consumer debt is more
than $6 trillion.

Our country faces critical housing needs,
crumbling public works, global warming, forest destruction, air and water pollution,
rampant corporate fraud, and numerous public health problems, all against a backdrop of
sprawl and gated communities, billions spent on campaigns, a burgeoning prison industry
with more than two million people incarcerated, a failed war on drugs, more than one
hundred million eligible voters who do not vote, and states that cannot even process the
votes of those who do.

Our two-party political system is engaged
in an unfair restraint of democratic participation. It is a duopoly that has erected
barriers to political engagement and is restricting the exercise of democracy in our
country. Our laws do not countenance such an illegitimate concentration of power in the
economy Do we hold our political and democratic values in lesser esteem?

Ralph Nader was the Green Party candidate
for president in the 2000 election. Theresa Amato was the campaign manager of the national
Nader 2000 campaign.